Full time MPs? It's hard to think of anything more depressing

My first, despairing thought on seeing the Telegraph splash late last night was that it would revive calls for MPs to be banned from second jobs. Sure enough, within minutes, Twitter was filled with pledges from pushy parliamentary candidates to the effect that, if they were elected, they'd be full-time MPs. Today, cretinously and inexorably, Ed Miliband joined in.

Perhaps the single ugliest change in the nature of politics over the past century has been the professionalisation of its practitioners – first at Westminster and now, in practice, on local authorities. What used to be regarded as an honour – the extraordinary privilege of representing your community in the nation's counsels – is now treated as a job. Hence the anger when MPs are seen to be doing things which we can't do in other jobs, such as having long recesses or voting on their pay or combining their duties with outside employment.

These criticisms are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what Parliament is for. MPs are not there to plough their way through legislation, Monday to Friday. They are there to represent the rest of us. Frankly, the less time they spend passing laws, the better.

In Texas, the legislature meets for 140 days every two years. No one treats it as a job: the salary is $600 a month, plus a $150 per diem when the assembly is in session. I can't help noticing that Texas is doing rather well: income tax is zero, growth is strong and people are flocking there from all over the United States. The closest European equivalent is probably Switzerland, which also has part-time MPs, who are compensated for their time but expected to derive their chief income from whatever they were doing before.

Instead of prohibiting second jobs, we should treat serving as an MP as being a second job. Our representatives should live mainly on whatever they earn as call-centre workers or vets or pensioners or whatever. Obviously, the parliamentary session would have to be shorter, and the hours fitted around the working day, but would this be such a bad thing? Many of the affairs that currently occupy MPs could be devolved to local authorities or, better, to individual citizens.

At this stage, a moth-eaten objection is trundled out. Politics, we are told, would become the preserve of the rich. In fact, that objection applies in theory rather than in practice. It wasn't long ago that local councillors were all, in effect, unpaid. There were declining industrial towns in northern England where income was well below the national mean, but where you could find decent and conscientious Labour councillors who were proud to serve their communities.

If Parliament met more rarely, and MPs received a low level of compensation for their attendance, those on high salaries would be making a higher proportionate sacrifice than those on low salaries. It's true that they'd still be better off in absolute terms, of course, but at least Parliament would become representative of the population at large. At present, by contrast, most MPs are pushed into the same income bracket, making the Commons singularly untypical.

Worst of all is the element of cant. For all his class-war rhetoric, Miliband knows perfectly well that you can combine being an MP with other paid work. He knows it because he used to do it himself, serving a full working week as Energy Secretary. And he knows it because he aspires to do so again, working full time as Prime Minister while still representing his constituents (I know, I know, but humour me).

Those jobs are far more demanding than keeping your hand in as a lecturer or solicitor or farmer. And, unlike private sector work, they necessarily involve a conflict of interest. A minister's job is to wield executive power, an MP's is to constrain it.

To be clear, I'm not talking here about consultancy jobs that people hold only because they are MPs. If my local MP were, say, a remunerated advocate for the alternative energy industry, or a shill for Saudi oil interests, I'd want him out. But that is a decision for his constituents: it's called democracy.

In the mean time, I want MPs to operate in the real economy, to be subject to its ups and downs, and to be as independent as possible of the state. Oh, and just to anticipate the "What about MEPs you ****ing hypocrite" comments, I am working towards the day when there is no such thing as a British MEP. If it bothers you, please join me in voting to leave the EU.